“Stop, stop there,” he ordered. “What does that mean?”
“What?” She turned the large eyes to him.
He grabbed the script page.
“First you say the body was found on the reservation and then you say it was found near it. Which one is it?”
“I don’t know,” she cried. “I took it off the wires. That’s what it said.”
Chuck exhaled in loud exasperation.
“Look, Maria, sometimes the wires are wrong. You have to read them first. But, anyway, this doesn’t make any sense.”
“Why?” She was moving into a hurt pout. “That’s what they said. First it said the body was found on the reservation, then later they said it was found near it. What’s the problem?”
“What’s the problem? It doesn’t make any sense, Maria,” he yelled. “It has to be one or the other. You have to read these things out loud to see if they make sense. I keep telling you that. Read them out loud. And, if it doesn’t make sense you are going to have to make some calls and find out what it should say.”
“Okay, okay,” she sniffed, “if that’s what you want.”
“It isn’t what I want,” he said through a clenched jaw. “It is what is right. Don’t you understand that?”
Debbie and Ellen leaned out of their cubicles and looked at each other.
“Doesn’t matter,” Ellen said in a low voice. “Somebody will soon be writing all her stuff. She’ll read it and make a hundred thousand a year in LA. You watch.”
“She is beautiful,” Debbie said of the olive-skinned woman with the big eyes and the silky black hair.
“Yeah, as she’s got the right name too.”
Each of the stations in town had their Hispanic or two and each had their blacks, fewer blacks than Hispanics.
“So does Tommy Rodriguez,” Debbie said of the evening and weekend reporter. “Have the right name, if that’s what you mean.”
Ellen laughed. “That’s not his real name.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Nope. I asked him once where he got the Rodriguez, who in the family. He said he didn’t know, something about his grandmother or someone. Come on. He doesn’t know?”
Debbie giggled.
“He’s from New York, right? So, I said, ‘Are you Puerto Rican?’ and he said no, he didn’t think so. Do you believe it?” She laughed again.
“Of course, he made it up. I knew that from the beginning. I asked Sandi in Accounting and she said he had a different name on his Social Security, some Anglo name. He’s about as Hispanic as I am. It’s easier to get a job as Tommy Rodriguez, that’s all.”
“Did you ever think about changing your name?” Debbie asked.
“No. I think I’d feel different with another name. Names make people. Think of all the Bruces you’ve ever known or the, um, Berthas.” She rolled her eyes. “All alike, huh? Names make you who you are, the way you are. I believe that.”
“What’s Jean Ann’s real name?” Debbie asked.
“Cracker Sue,” Ellen said and laughed.
*
Debbie easily slipped into the talk and the work of the newsroom. She was on five days a week with one stretching into the night. No weekends but that could come. There were never any guarantees about what you might have to do for the good of The Best.
The first few weeks she got none of the run-and-gun stores, the spot news, the accidents, shootings, fires. It was slow, the end of the tourist season, not too hot yet, and the floods had passed them by this year. She had a month or so of city council meetings, county supervisors, new programs at the university. Standard, everyday, everyman’s newsroom kind of stories.
“I like it here,” she told anyone listening. “I really do.”
“Sure you do,” seemed to be the unspoken response.
She filled her small apartment with all she had carried, hauled, and shipped from Bakersfield and from the house in Oregon. That made the apartment sidestepping crowded. Still, she moved easily through the rooms, touching at her things as she did so. The apartment and all within it seemed a part of her, an invisible cape that swirled around her.
Someone once told her she was a homebody, a nester. She was also a good basic cook. It was the way she first opened herself to them, the others in the newsroom. Although shy, she pushed herself to say, “I am making some spaghetti tonight if anybody wants to take a chance.”
“Sure,” came the answer. Why the hell not.
She offered a free meal and they didn’t get many of those. Free meals came with a story attached, some luncheon or breakfast. Why not stop by the new reporter’s place? You didn’t have to pay with work. Some of them thought that way.
Debbie’s, “I’ll have lots, so come by,” may have sounded like a casual invitation but it wasn’t. She worried about whether or not they would come. They might dislike her just for asking. She was nobody, the new girl. They didn’t need her.
At first, the few who did come acted embarrassed if alone, or boisterous if with others.
“Here for a free meal,” they would yell and push past her. “Nice place. When do we eat?”
Those were the married men. They came at least once. Both Jack Benton and Frank Kowalski shared the unspoken feeling that there might be something going on over at the new reporter’s place. They weren’t exactly sure what but they both had the feeling that whatever it was, they should know about it.
“Fresh meat,” is what Benton said when Debbie first walked into the newsroom.“Right off the farm,” said Ferguson.
All they saw at her apartment was a blushing serving of lasagna and a few glasses of jug wine. It was dumb, too dumb and too tame to go back.
The unmarried photographers felt better about it, the ones who went. They made it a few times. Steve Kramer stopped by when he was drunk or needed someone to drink with him. He was forty-five
